Amazon launched its cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in 2006. The first major public offerings included Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), giving businesses access to storage and computing power over the internet.
AWS grew from Amazon’s need to build reliable, scalable infrastructure for its expanding online store. Instead of keeping those internal tools exclusively for Amazon, the company turned them into commercial services that other organizations could rent and use on demand.
The launch helped popularize cloud computing: companies could obtain servers, databases, and storage without buying and maintaining all the physical hardware themselves. A common mix-up is confusing AWS’s launch year with the dates when individual services were introduced or expanded. AWS began in 2006, while many later services arrived in subsequent years.